Inside '21'
If you were among the chosen ones, the '21' mystique could be heady. Journalist and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote in the 1936 commemorative book, "When I step across its threshold, I begin to feel elegant. I like myself. If I've had a bad morning on the typewriter, or one of those moods when I feel all hands and feet and tag ends, I forget about it instantly, Here is friendliness. Here is approval. I don't know why--but that always happens to me in '21.' I am quite sure that I am slim, that I look my best." Not everyone was so reverential. In This Week, the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune, on April 14 Jack Sher and John Keating, who visited with actor Robert Walker for an interview, called the place “a high-priced mess hall frequented by movie stars, bank presidents, jockeys and other people with large bankrolls.”
Once inside, a regular was almost certain to run into someone they knew. Table hopping was a major sport. The place was run like a private club. Regulars were pampered with attention. The phone booth in the lobby connected to the '21' switchboard operator who placed calls for you. She also took messages when you were out of town. Patrons could also receive calls at their table. You could dial the switchboard to be connected to an airline, hotel or theater. Their was a lounge with a fireplace and stacks of current magazines and newspapers. Favored patrons could park their dogs in the lounge; in other elite restaurants canines were confined in the checkroom. Books written by '21' regulars were offered for sale at the tobacco counter. '21' had a barber shop where along with the shave and haircut you could get a shoe shine or a headache treatment and take calls. It had a small gym, rarely used by patrons equipped with weights, a jump rope, medicine ball, a steam cabinet and a masseur. Steam cabinets were big things at the time.
A lot of the literary and theatrical celebrities who patronized '21' in the '30s and '40s leaned politically well to the left but this did not stop them from indulging in the privileges that fame and wealth brought or patronizing a place where the Common Man was barred as a matter of policy. Kriendler wrote that during the waiters' strike of the 1930s, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott joined the picketers in front of the Waldorf-Astoria to show their solidarity with the working class, then repaired for drinks to '21,' where they crossed a picket line to get in. Their apolitical colleague, Robert Benchley, loudly called them out when he saw them skulking at a corner table.
'21' had three rooms downstairs, including the notorious "Siberia" to the East. They are all actually one large room, demarcated by the structural elements left over from the three townhouses that were merged during the expansion. The tables downstairs were covered in red and white checkered tablecloths. The atmosphere bordered on the raucous. The tables in the center room facing the bar was coveted by many regulars. The two rooms upstairs were considerably more formal and sedate with elegant table settings and floral arrangements. Many older patrons from the society set preferred the upper level as did those for whom pomp and circumstance was of great import. The cream of the crop was escorted to the Front Room where they were treated with enormous fuss from the moment they stepped in. All of the tables here were considered good tables. '21' also had a private room upstairs for banquets.